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Animal Stories at the Gardiner Museum

The Gardiner Museum's Animal Stories, with its two-storey-high promotional poster of a cutesified white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland festooning the building's facade, blares “family-friendly” with near-desperate enthusiasm.

This only makes sense: Museums promising diversions for the under-12 set score big points with parents just as desperate to divorce their kids, however briefly, from their iPads and whatever other solipsistic electronic diversions they can get their hands on.

Wendy Walgate's Five Litres, three laboratory beakers filled with porceloian animal figures she cast from commercial moulds, part of the Gardiner Museum's Animal Stories.

In this case, I say: Whatever gets them through the door. Animal Stories is anything but twee juvenilia. Instead, the exhibition, which spans a breadth of centuries of artistic production, techniques, and narratives — some intentional, some not — is a sly, subversive take on humanity's discordant, often-sadistic relationship with the natural world.

That it manages to deftly filter that relationship through 300 years of shifting geopolitics and the rise of science in a faith-based world, quietly but insistently, makes it absolutely triumphal. No kidding. Animal Stories is one of the most cleverly curated shows I saw in 2013. A wolf in sheep's clothing, you might say, it takes on nothing less than modernity itself, and humanity's complicity in various disasters — ecological but one of them — as a result.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The show opens with a sinewy, colourful porcelain, all of 6 feet tall, called Heron Stick Stand, from England in 1876. It's a menacing, primordial thing, glistening as it crushes a fish in its sharp beak. This, in the era of Darwin (he died in 1882), was decorative — a romanticized version of survival of the fittest, celebrating nature's majestic ability to right itself in an organic order of things.

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The fact that humanity was going in the opposite direction, in full bloom of the Industrial Revolution and advances in technology that made such slick, hyper-real representations even possible, is a powerful undercurrent here that runs through the entire show.

Across the room, tiny perfume bottles and salt and pepper shakers in the form of finches, butterflies and shells predate the heron by more than a hundred years, expressing the dawn of the scientific era in Europe that would eventually become the foundation in which Darwin would build his theories. Botany and zoology, if not challenging organized religion and the notion of nature as the earthly expression of the almighty, were certainly adding depth and complexity to the physical world, thrusting it forward while destabilizing it all at once. Glorified, prettified, and for nearly the first-time mass-produced, little objects like these bundle up the contradictions of the dawn of modernity, with its great promise and eventual disasters, as potent foreshadowing.

And you don't have to wait long. Nearby and placed between the two, Wendy Walgate's Five Litres, made in 2013, puts a fine point on it. Three large laboratory beakers spill over with glossy porcelain animal figures; blue for avian, green for aquatic, pink for earthbound. They're a mess, crammed together, seeming to gasp for air. It doesn't take a genius to sort out what Walgate's up to: By crafting a menagerie of manufacture nature, each of them cast from industrial moulds used, at one point, to mass-produce such objects, Walgate reverses the reverence of nature and turns it to excoratiating lament, I think, and powerfully so. Our species, by dint of our industriousness, commodifies animals as easily as anything else — and throws them away just as easily.

Walgate reprises the theme later in the exhibition, with a similar but less ecologically pointed clustering of critters in Hannibal Bear High Chair, but such points and counterpoints abound here. A small section on hunting, much of it from the 19th century, glorifies sport-killing as a decorative motif (one elaborate plate shows a fox hunting scene; a large tureen in the shape of a wild boar's head, eyes closed, placidly dead, does the same thing with grotesque self-regard). High above, two taxidermied deer heads, the only real, dead things here, survey the scene like sentinels and unsubtle reminders of our centuries-old disregard for the animal world.

Animal Stories doesn't stick to animals. That's already clear in the opening of the show, where the industrial era's obsession with trinketeered animal representations sound the alarm for the mass-produced world we inhabit now. One section of the show, though, takes on colonialism and its various destructions as eager European explorers imported notions of the exotic as titillative displays of their conquering prowess. The Trojan horse in this case is Clara, an Indian rhinoceros dragged back to The Netherlands in 1741 for the first leg of her European tour.

That it lasted to her death in 1758, following hundreds of appearances and just as many sculptures, drawings and other awestruck representations — proto-merchandising — underlines the usurious nature of the human beast.

Not to say we're done with all that; nearby, Florence Chik-Lau's 2013 sculptures of Er Shun and Da Mao — the Toronto panda duo borrowed from China that created such a stir last year — underlines how we're still using animal surrogates as diplomatic fodder — subtext, really, for a broader conversation about the power of exchange, and who gains the upper hand.

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Meanwhile, the delicate, gorgeous white porcelain sculpture of Clara here is really just a good excuse for a larger discussion. This was the era of zoos and circuses — the imprisonment, enslavement, and domination of the strange exotica nature begat continents away. To pretend this was limited to the animal kingdom is wilfull ignorance, of course, and the potent undercurrent of the show is the west's historic, often-violent dominance of other cultures and peoples, which is as much a feature of modernity as industrial and scientific prowess.

This is pervasive, thoughtful bleakness — the best kind. Animal Stories runs it right up to the present day, with Jeff Koons' Puppies, the artist's critique on mass-produced kitsch, through Shary Boyle's delicate White Fright, a lace-winged porcelain bat, its fragility underscoring the species' endangered status, and finally, Janet MacPherson's Pilgrimage. In it, a small band of distorted creatures are frozen in a limping march towards a grim, possible future. A rat leads the procession, sporting two heads; a lamb's head is bandaged around the jaw; a bear cub is swathed around its eyes.

The binding, I'm told, draws on MacPherson's Catholic heritage and its penchant towards mysticism and ritual. Transferred here, to an ungainly band of outcast creatures lost in a wilderness not of their making, the repressive nature of ritualized behaviour resonates all the more loudly. Animal Stories, more than anything, tells of humanity's impositions on the natural world — our own sad ritual, with its wake of destruction, and the final chapter being written as we speak.

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